Tag Archives: Leftist / Islamic Alliance

I have read about the paradoxical alliance between Islam and the left for years. I have even written about it — at some length, in fact, in my newest book Scarlet Letters. But it was only a few weeks go that I got to see up close the mechanisms that allow people who celebrate homosexuals to find common cause with those who, when the law allows, happily sever their heads.

As a result of my book, I was invited to sit on a panel titled “Muslim in the Metro,” an event sponsored by an enterprise called American Public Square and televised in edited form — fairly, I must say — on the regional PBS channel here in Kansas City, KCPT.

There were five panelists — myself, a Republican state rep from Kansas, a fiftyish Muslim woman in the diversity business, a U.S. attorney appointed by Obama, and a female Muslim college student who used the word “microagression” as something other than a punch line to a joke. The moderator was also a former Obama appointee.

I would use names, but I am confident if American Public Square ran a comparable event in other cities, the four Muslim advocates — the moderator included — would espouse almost identical views. They represent a type. So too did the overwhelmingly liberal audience. I could have written their questions for them.

These American Public Square debates feature an active online fact checker and a civility bell. I was a little queasy about the civility bell, but I welcomed the fact checker. He proved to be my greatest ally.

The state rep did a fine job. As an elected official he had to be a little cautious, but he made his case about terror and immigration well.

My strategy was a little different. Knowing that I was not about to convert anyone, I thought I could at least confuse the audience members with the truth, and the truth is that their affection for Islam makes no apparent sense. This proved to be a difficult assignment, and here is why.

The left has a unique ability to deny the obvious.

In attempting to establish my premise, I said to the panel, “Muslims are culturally very conservative around the world,” adding rhetorically, “Is that fair to say?”

This premise struck me as inarguable. My fellow panelists felt otherwise. The two women, both wearing Hijabs, and the moderator all shouted out “No” or some variant. Said I, “When it comes to issues like family, women, abortion, gay rights, you’re telling me they’re not conservative?”

The moderator admonished me. “Jack,” he said, “you’re asking a question, and they didn’t give you the answer you want.” He then challenged me to make my case or move on.

Knowing there was a fact checker, I pulled out my one file card and read through the numbers from Pew Research Foundation, a liberal but generally reliable source. When asked about gay rights, 87 percent of Germans approved but no more than 9 percent of Muslims in any country surveyed and as little as 2 percent in some.

On the question of whether a women should always obey her husband, 87 percent of Muslims approved. On the question of whether apostates should be executed, 56 percent of Muslims who approved of Sharia law said yes. Asked whether they held “highly unfavorable” views of Jews, 99 percent of Jordanians and 100 percent of Lebanese sad yes. The fact checker could not deny what I was saying.

My fellow panelists could and did. They protested that these attitudes did not reflect American Muslims, but I had to repeat that I began my discussion by saying these surveys were done in the countries that comprise our immigration pool, and that the threat of immigration motivated the anti-Muslim sentiment about which they complained.

The left instinctively denies the worth of America.

I did concede that American Muslims were likely more moderate in their views. This relative moderation, I argued, reflected the “palliative effect of American culture on Islam.” This comment drew boos from the audience. From the left’s perspective, nothing America does is palliative.

The left controls the debate.

When I added, “If you go to Cologne, Germany you’re going to meet people who haven’t had that [palliative] experience,” the moderator insisted that I stick to local issues. Europe seemed particularly off limits. Although this was billed as a nonpartisan event, it proved to be no more nonpartisan than PBS in general or CNN or NBC or the New York Times. The moderator unabashedly took sides.

The left inevitably falls back on false moral equivalence.

Indeed, from the Muslim women and especially from the U.S. Attorney, there was so much talk of Timothy McVeigh, Clive Bundy, the KKK, the Sovereignty movement, and even the mid 19th-century Know-Nothing Party, a latecomer might have thought the event about Christian terrorism. Of course, in none of these conversations did the moderator insist the speaker restrict himself to local issues.

The left is plagued with cognitive dissonance.

I kept returning to the transparently separate standards liberals held for traditional Christians and traditional Muslims. I pointed out, for instance, that the Kansas City Star designated a prominent liberal pastor a “drum major for justice” for his denunciation of the Christian right as “a threat far greater than the old threat of Communism.”

The fact checker confirmed that to be an exact quote. And the threat the pastor alluded had nothing to do with violence. No, what troubled him was that Christian conservatives were running for office. They were “anti-pornography,” he warned, and opposed — he noted daintily — a woman’s “having a say about what goes on in her own body.”

Had he said something half as outrageous about Muslims, he would have lost his pulpit, if not his head. Focusing his spite on Christians, however, got his speech excerpted in the New York Times and won him the Harry S. Truman Good Neighbor Award.

The alliance validates the left’s moral superiority.

At one point, the older Muslim woman claimed to have been so appalled by the “anti-Muslim” tenor of the Republican debates that she would not let her children watch them. Echoed the U.S. Attorney, “Their children see grown men espousing hate.”

Bingo! There was the money quote. Indeed, if there is one shared feel good experience among leftists of all stripes it is the imputation of “hate” to others. Author Shelby Steele coined the phrase “zone of decency” to describe the sacred preserve in which progressives imagine themselves clustering. By aligning themselves with Muslims, liberals assure themselves a place in the zone and “decertify” those not quite so keen on self-destruction.

Did I mention that the left denies the obvious?

My opponents on the panel repeatedly insisted that terrorists did not represent Islam. “You have places called the Islamic State,” I countered. “These guys think they’re the real deal.”

“What one chooses to call oneself is not necessarily the only test we have to apply,” said the moderator who had long since abandoned anything resembling neutrality.

“There is an element of disingenuousness about this conversation tonight,” I replied. I pointed out that there are millions of Muslims who subscribed to ISIS or who supported ISIS “To make believe that there is not a religious thread to this,” I concluded, “is to deceive ourselves.”

“What’s disingenuous is to blithely say there are millions,” the moderator snapped back. He then made the fatal mistake of asking for a fact check on my numbers. Said the fact checker, “Pew says 63 million Muslims support the Islamic State in the eleven Muslim countries polled.”

When did standing up for basic human rights become hate speech? The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) can’t seem to tell the difference any more. It was once a premier civil rights organization instrumental in taking down the Ku Klux Klan. Now it attacks those who profess unpopular or politically incorrect opinions. The latest target is the Center for Security Policy (CSP) for our work exposing and opposing Islamist groups. For this they are adding us to their annual list of “hate groups”.

CSP stands for freedom and liberty against a collection of groups that really do “hate”. We believe that all people should be able to live freely, but the radical Islamist groups do not. The premier institute of Islamic thought is al-Azhar University in Egypt and it publicly stated that even ISIS was still part of Islam. We should not be censored for pointing that out and that we differ from the Islamists on numerous other human rights issues as well.

We believe women are equal citizens. They believe women are property whose testimony in court counts less than a man’s.We believe homosexuals have a right to live without fear. They believe homosexuals should be hung or tossed off rooftops.

We believe young girls are humans with full rights. They believe in female genital mutilation, honor killings and child brides.

In what crazy mixed up world are we the bad guys for making this clear? Loving the freedoms all people are endowed with by their creator is an embodiment of American values. The Islamic law, sharia, they look to impose is an embodiment of subjugation. Too many Muslims actually think shariah should be supreme over our Supreme Court and the entire Constitution. CSP vigorously opposes this and we will speak out against it, and we hope others will add their voices.

The Islamist groups have made some unlikely allies on the political Left, like the SPLC. Together they are trying to suppress free speech by calling it Islamophobia. A phobia is an irrational fear, but the horrors perpetrated by the violent Islamists are all too real as are the attempts by their allies to bring customs abhorrent to free people here.

We will continue to speak out strongly in support of the freedoms that make this country great. It is love of those freedoms, not “hate” that leads us to call out those who truly deserve that moniker. The Islamists oppress women, homosexuals, non-believers and they are using violent and civilizational means to impose their will on all of us. CSP believes in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Hanson is the executive vice president for the Center for Security Policy.

The left’s greatest intellectual error is its conviction that the world can be divided into a binary power struggle in which both sides agree on the nature of the struggle, but disagree on the outcome.

For leftists of a certain generation, it was class. Marx began the Communist Manifesto by laying out a primal class struggle throughout human history. For Marxists, everything in the world could be broken down to a class struggle with the wealthy oppressors on one side and the oppressed on the other.

It didn’t matter that this model didn’t fit a reality in which Communists leaders came from wealthy backgrounds and their opponents were just as likely to be poor peasants. To the left, everything is defined by the model. Reality is an inconvenience that is suppressed with gulags and firing squads.

Today the variable is identity politics. Everything must be intersectional. There are those who stand on the right side of history, in favor of abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration. Everyone who isn’t on board is a racist, even if they’re black or Latino, a sexist, even if they’re female, or a homophobe, even if they’re gay. Once again, reality doesn’t matter. The binary struggle is the model for everything.

The left believes that there is a binary struggle over the future of humanity with only two sides. It does not understand how the right actually thinks and it has no room for understanding equally compelling belief systems that operate outside this model.

That’s where Islam comes in. Or doesn’t.

The left has never been able to understand religion. It’s not so much secular or atheistic as it is consumed by a compelling belief system of its own which leaves no room for religious conviction.

It cannot understand anything in terms of what it is. It can only understand things in terms of itself. The left cannot understand religion on its own terms, only in terms of how the religion fits into the left.

Unable to understand religion, the left assigns it a place based on its alignment in the struggle. Is it a reactionary force that supports the existing order of a progressive force that opposes it? Is it working with the ruling classes or the oppressed? Is it on the side of the left or on the side of the right?

Islam is racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which has become the left’s closest Islamic ally, was politically influenced by Nazi Germany. Its leaders were outraged by the end of the Caliphate’s feudalism and maintain extensive business networks around the world. They incite riots against minorities and seek to establish a theocracy.

If there’s any Muslim organization that should be a textbook reactionary, fascist and fundamentalist group, it’s the Muslim Brotherhood. But instead the left cuddles up with the violent hate group. Why?

Because the Muslim Brotherhood in the West is aligned with their progressive causes. Therefore it can’t be reactionary. If the Brotherhood were aligned with conservatives, then it would be the enemy.

And so liberals don’t care what the Koran says. The Koran means nothing to them, just as the Bible means nothing to them. Religion is either on the side of social justice or it isn’t. Since Muslims are part of their glorious intersectional rainbow coalition, then Islam must be a good religion.

It’s that stupidly simple. And no amount of Koran quotes will change that.

There’s a strong element of cynicism here. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. But there’s also a deeper inability by the left to understand Islam and any ideology outside its worldview.

The left reacted to the rise of ISIS with frantic incoherence. They literally could not understand what made the Islamic State tick because it didn’t fit any of their political models. ISIS couldn’t exist, yet there was no way to deny that it existed. And so lefty pundits and politicians gibbered that they were nihilists who believed in nothing, even though no one blows themselves up because they believe in nothing.

Muslim terrorists don’t kill people because of Allah, the Koran or the Caliphate. It doesn’t fit the model. They kill, because like all Third World peoples victimized by colonialism, they are oppressed. A Muslim terrorist doesn’t kill Jews or Americans because the Koran commands the Believers to subjugate all non-Muslims. A Muslim migrant doesn’t sexually assault German women because the Koran allows him to.

These are all reactions to Western oppression. The Muslim oppressors are really the oppressed.

But the Islamic State killed other Muslims to establish a Caliphate ruled by Islamic law. The oppressed Muslims were suddenly acting like evil Western oppressors. And if Muslims could be oppressors, then the whole binary model the left had been using to explain the world comes tumbling down.

When the left comes up against inconsistencies in its binary model, it doesn’t revise the model, instead it tries to understand why people are behaving so irrationally that they don’t fit the model. Why don’t poor rural whites vote for the left? It must be talk radio and racism. How can there be conservative minorities? False consciousness. Also Thomas Sowell and Stacey Dash aren’t “really” minorities.

Islam and Muslims are fundamentally outside the left’s model. They are part of their own binary struggle between Islam and everything else. They have their own “right side of history”.

Islam and the left both claim to have “perfect” systems that can create a utopia… after a whole lot of killing. They are aligned with each other, yet unable to understand each other because their worldviews have no room for anything outside their perfect models. Leftists despise fundamentalists and Islamists despise atheists and yet here they are working together while ignoring what the other believes.

The left cannot process the idea that religion transcends politics. At best, leftists see religion as a subset of politics. And since Islam conforms to their political axis, it must be progressive. But to Muslims, politics is a subset of religion. Politics cannot transcend religion because it is an expression of religion.

Leftists do not understand religion and therefore they cannot understand Muslims. They see Islam as another religion to be brought into its sphere of influence to promote social justice to its followers. They cannot understand that Muslim clergy will not become preachers of social justice or that Muslims kill because they genuinely believe in Allah and a paradise for martyrs. These ideas are alien to them.

The alliance between Islam and the left brings together two narrow-minded worldviews. The left cannot recognize that Islam wants something other than gay marriage, abortion rights, a $15 minimum wage, Green Jobs and all the rest of its endless social justice agenda because that would put it on the same side as the Republicans and the rest of the right. And that clearly isn’t so either.

The left need not give up all of its beliefs to understand Islam. But it would have to abandon its binary thinking and recognize that there have been and are other struggles in the world than the one it defines. And this the left is unwilling to do because a binary struggle is what makes its worldview so encompassing. If its worldview doesn’t encompass the world, then it cannot demand absolute power.

The left cannot accept that its great struggle is really a disastrous sideshow in a larger civilizational conflict or that its agenda is not universal, but the product of a particular intellectual strain that has little application outside its own bubble. And so it will go on rejecting the truth about Islam, because learning the truth about Islam would not only destroy the alliance with Islam, but would also destroy the left.

Although Facebook’s ground rules officially prohibit bullying, harassment, and threatening language, last year it received numerous complaints about online incitement. On January 18, Facebook launched an initiative to prevent anti-Muslim hate speech on its German platform. But, according to a lawsuit filed in New York state court and a highly-publicized “experiment,”Facebook has no problem with anti-Jewish incitement.

Last October 20, the German daily Bildprinted a double-page newspaper spread documenting racist vitriol posted on Facebook against migrants. On November 10 – days before the Paris attacks – Hamburg prosecutors launched an investigation into Facebook for allegedly failing to remove racist postings. The investigation was reportedly motivated by concern over “how the country’s long-dormant far-right was using Facebook to mobilize” against the influx of refugees. In other words, it was motivated by concern over anti-Muslim and anti-Arab posts.

Perhaps stung by that criticism, mere days after two Muslims murdered fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed that Facebook would “create a peaceful and safe environment” for Muslim users.

On January 18, Facebook launched a Europe-wide campaign to “thwart extremist postings.” This was part of an agreement it reached with Germany. Steps Facebook has taken include hiring the German company Bertelsmann to monitor and delete racist posts to its German platform and funding non-governmental organizations devoted to countering online extremism.

There was another Facebook-related headline on January 18. NBC News reported that Shurat HaDin (an Israeli NGO modeled on the Southern Poverty Law Center) was crowdsourcing to raise funds for an ad campaign. Entitled “Zuckerberg don’t kill us,” the campaign is part of an effort to pressure Facebook not to continue tolerating posts inciting Palestinians to kill Jews. The recent wave of Palestinian attacks had killed 29 Israelis and injured 289 as of January 18.

According to Shurat HaDin, Facebook actively assists people inciting murderous attacks against Jews to find others who are interested in acting on the hateful messages by offering friend, group, and event suggestions and targeting advertising based on people’s online “likes” and internet browsing history. What is more, Facebook often refuses to take down the inciting pages, claiming that they do not violate its “community standards.” Last October, Shurat HaDin filed a lawsuitagainst Facebook in New York state court, seeking to enjoin Facebook from allowing the incitement to continue.

Shurat HaDin demonstrated Facebook’s bias by conducting an online experiment. On December 28, it set up two Facebook pages, one filled with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel postings, the other with anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian postings. The NGO then ratcheted up the incitement level with parallel posts to both pages, ultimately calling for death to Jews and Arabs.

Then, Shurat HaDin simultaneously reported both pages to Facebook. The same day, Facebook closed the anti-Palestinian page, stating that it violated Facebook’s community standards.

And the page inciting violence against Jews? Initially, Facebook refused to shut it down. Instead, it sent a message reporting that the page did not violate Facebook’s rules. Only after Shurat HaDin reported what it had done and media picked up the story did Facebook change its tune and closethe page, claiming the page did indeed violate Facebook standards, and that the earlier message to the contrary had been a “mistake.”

Now Israel is working to build an international coalition to pressure social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to take greater responsibility for content posted on them. Ideas under discussion include developing legislation to prosecute social media platforms for failing to keep calls for violence and hateful materials off their platforms. The idea has reportedly gained traction in some European countries.

Where is Facebook’s initiative to prevent anti-Jewish incitement on its Israel platform? Why is Facebook responding so differently to complaints about incitement against Muslims and Jews? Is it too protective of Muslims, or too callous toward Jews? And how many times will its hypocrisy have to be exposed before it begins applying its “community standards” evenhandedly?

Men and women, some whose clothes were still marked with gray ash, walked dazedly toward Union Square. Many did not know what to do or where to go. So they kept on walking. They knew the country was under attack, but they did not know how bad it was or what might still be heading for them.

Behind them lay a changed city and thousands of American dead. Ahead was the bronze statue of George Washington, facing into the devastation and raising his hand to lead his men forward in victory. Around its base, with the destruction of the World Trade Center as their backdrop, leftists had set up shop, coloring anti-war posters even while rescue workers were risking their lives at Ground Zero.

In the coming days, the statue of Washington would be repeatedly vandalized by leftists drawing peace signs and “No War” and “War is Not the Answer” slogans on it. But that moment crystallized my realization that while Muslim terrorists had carried out the attack, it was the left we would have to fight.

While some New Yorkers had gone to help the victims of Islamic terrorists, the left had rushed to aid the terrorists. Unlike the rest of us, they were not shocked or horrified by the attack. They were treasonously working on ways to spin the murder of thousands of Americans to protect the enemy.

The greatest obstacle to defeating Islamic terrorism is still the left.

The left helped create Islamic terrorism; its immigration policies import terrorism while its civil rights arm obstructs efforts to prevent it and its anti-war rallies attack any effort to fight it. In America, in Europe and in Israel, and around the world, to get at Islamic terrorists, you have to go through the left.

When a Muslim terrorist comes to America, it’s the left that agitates to admit him. Before he kills, it’s the left that fights to protect him from the FBI. Afterward, leftists offer to be his lawyers. The left creates the crisis and then it fights against any effort to deal with it except through surrender and appeasement.

Islamic violence against non-Muslims predated the left. But it’s the left that made it our problem. Islamic terrorism in America or France exists because of Muslim immigration. And the left is obsessed with finding new ways to import more Muslims. Merkel is praised for opening up a Europe already under siege by Islamic terror, Sharia police, no-go zones and sex grooming and groping gangs, to millions.

The left feverishly demands that the whole world follow her lead. Bill Gates would like America to be just like Germany. Israel’s deranged Labor Party leader Herzog urged the Jewish State to open its doors.

And then, after the next round of stabbings, car burnings and terror attacks, they blame the West for not “integrating” the un-integratable millions who had no more interest in being integrated than their leftist patrons do in moving to Pakistan and praying to Allah on a threadbare rug. But “integration” is a euphemism for a raft of leftist agenda items from social services spending to punishing hate speech (though never that of the Imams crying for blood and death, but only of their native victims) to a foreign policy based on appeasement and surrender. Islamic terrorists kill and leftists profit from the carnage.

The ongoing threat of Islamic terrorism is a manufactured crisis that the left cultivates because that gives it power. In a world without 9/11, the Obama presidency would never have existed. Neither would the Arab Spring and the resulting migration and wholesale transformation of Western countries.

In the UK, Labour used Muslim immigration as a deliberate political program to “change the country.” In Israel, Labor struck an illegal deal with Arafat that put sizable portions of the country under the control of terrorists while forcing the Jewish State into a series of concessions to terrorists and the left. The same fundamental pattern of Labour and Labor and the whole left is behind the rise of Islamic terrorism.

Muslim terrorism creates pressure that the left uses to achieve policy goals. Even when it can’t win elections, Muslim terrorism allows the left to create a crisis and then to set an agenda.

The left’s patronage of Islamic terrorists for its own political purposes follows a thread back to the origin of Islamic terrorism. Islamic violence against non-Muslims dates back to the founding of Islam, but the tactics of modern Islamic terrorism owe as much to Lenin as they do to Mohammed.

Today’s Islamic terrorist is the product of traditional Islamic theology and Soviet tactics. The USSR did not intend to create Al Qaeda, but they provided training and doctrine to terrorists from the Muslim world. The “secular” and “progressive” terrorists of the left either grew Islamist, like Arafat, or their tactics were copied and expanded on, like the PFLP, by a new generation of Islamic terrorists.

The earlier phase of Islamic organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, had been inspired by fascists who were seeking to use them in their own wars. Over this layer of secret societies plotting takeovers and building networks of front groups, the Soviet Union added the terror tactics that had been employed by the left. And the leftist mad bomber became the Muslim suicide bomber.

Terrorism in the Muslim world has evolved from functioning as a Third World proxy army for the left, in much the same way as guerrillas and terrorists from Asia, Africa and Latin America had, to a diaspora whose migrations lend a domestic terror arm to a Western left whose own spiteful activists have grown unwilling to put their lives on the line and go beyond tweeting words to throwing bombs.

With the Muslim Brotherhood, the origin organization of Al Qaeda, ISIS and Hamas, among many others, so tightly integrated into the American and European left that it is often hard to see where one begins and the other ends, Islam has become the militant arm of the purportedly secular left. Western leftists and Islamists have formed the same poisonous relationship as Middle Eastern leftists and Islamists did leading to the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Arab Spring. Leftists expected Islamists to do the dirty work while they would take over. Instead the Islamists won and killed them.

Having learned nothing from the Hitler-Stalin pact, the left has replayed the same betrayal with the Mohammed-Stalin pact in the Middle East and now in the West. But the end of the Mohammed-Stalin pact will not be a Socialist totalitarian utopia, but an Islamic theocracy of slaves, terror and death.

On September 11, I saw with my own eyes how eager and willing leftists were to rush to the aid of Islamic terrorists even while their fellow Americans were dying. Nothing has changed. Every Islamic act of brutality is met with lies and spin, with mass distraction and deception by the treasonous left. Every effort to fight Islamic terrorists is sabotaged, undermined and protested by the enemy within.

Since September 11, the left has trashed the FBI’s counterterrorism and has now succeeded in destroying the NYPD’s counterrorism while transforming the FDNY into an affirmative action project. What the September 11 hijackers could never accomplish on their own, the leftists did for them by defeating the three forces that had stood against Islamic terrorists on that day. And it would not surprise me at all if some of the “No War” scribblers have gone on to play an influential role in that treason.

The left has crippled domestic and international counterterrorism. American soldiers are not allowed to shoot terrorists and the FBI and NYPD can’t monitor mosques or even be taught what to look for. Islamic terrorism has achieved unprecedented influence and power under Obama. ISIS has created the first functioning caliphate and Iran marches toward the first Jihadist nuclear bomb. The mass Muslim migration is beginning a process that will Islamize Europe far more rapidly than anyone expects.

The Jihad would not be a significant threat without the collaboration of the left. Without the left standing in the way, it’s a problem that could be solved in a matter of years. With the aid of the left, it threatens human civilization with a dark age that will erase our culture, our future and our freedom.

We cannot defeat Islam without defeating the left. That is the lesson I learned on September 11. It is a lesson that appears truer every single year as the left finds new ways to endanger us all.

This strategic overview argues for how the War on Terror should be visualized alongside the processes that seek to obscure it and reflects analyses undertaken over the years to explain the nature of the threat in light of emerging Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) protocols, how the enemy envisions the war, and how he understands victory.

The metaphor is a house engulfed in a crucible of flames. Where the people burning in the house see three players, it is long overdue to understand them as one. Where people see civilization jihad disassociated from assaults from the left, it is time to recognize alliance. The enemy believes he has enjoyed success in the war and, indeed, believes he is winning. This view has merit.

The strategic picture painted by this overview is based on the enemy’s self-identified threat doctrine when mapped against the authorities he relies on to legitimize his activities and guide his operations. For this analysis, a decision was made to exclude all bureaucratic programmatics and academic models.

It is based on who the enemy in the War on Terror says he is, not on how others define him. The enemy states repeatedly that he fights jihad to impose Islamic law (shariah) and to re-establish the Caliphate. He does not say he fights jihad to force conversion of non-Muslims to Islam. He never states that he fights in furtherance of “root” or “underlying” causes.

From a legal perspective, the threat’s stated fidelity to shariah as the law of the land suggests that the threat does not raise First Amendment issues so much as it raises concerns regarding Article VI of the Constitution (“This Constitution shall be … the supreme law of the land”). It turns out that Islamic law, with unsettling precision, supports “violent extremists” to a degree that true moderates cannot match and that faux moderates seek to suppress.

This explains why “moderates” of all stripes avoid talking about Islamic law when discussing Islamic terrorism. This overview does not delve into defining doctrines when discussing the threat’s strategic reality. However, it is hoped that the concepts identified here, viewed as a whole, will offer clarity and shed important light on the most serious threat facing the United States today.

While all elements of U.S. national power are engaged in kinetic operations against “violent extremists” in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the primary threat actually defines itself as mujahids, views kinetic operations as a support activity tasked with either sustaining strategic distractions or supporting narratives, and seeks victory against the United States through ideological subversion directed against senior leadership and media elites. This analysis challenges the current conceptual and operational framework and calls for its dramatic reconsideration.

A diagram (see page 3) is used to illustrate the three lines of operation along which the United States has come under sustained assault in the War on Terror in much the way that a house can be engulfed in flames. All of these lines of operation, only one of which is kinetic, will be associated with a real-world entity to show how it orients on the objective.

A further objective is to advocate a return to true intelligence analysis and urge the abandonment of current analytical processes that sustain the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) narrative at the expense of a real threat-focused fact-based analysis.

It’s starting to look like the Book of Job. For years, he’s been demonized in his nation’s media for criticizing Islam. In 2011 and 2012, he was put on trial – not one, twice, but three times – for violating a Danish law that makes it a crime to insult or denigrate a religion. Last month, a guy came to his door dressed as a mailman and tried to kill him; his survival seems nothing short of a miracle.

You might think that in the wake of this assassination attempt, Lars Hedegaard would get some respect – or at least solidarity – from the Danish media. But you could only think that if you were unaware of the aftermath of the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, whose bodies weren’t even cold when Dutch journalists set about smearing them even more enthusiastically than they had before, essentially blaming them for their own deaths. Many of Lars’s fellow Danes, to be sure, did rally round him after his close call. But in large part, the Danish media’s reaction was depressingly predictable. As I noted just last week, a couple of morally challenged employees of the newspaper Ekstra Bladet actually tried to follow a moving van to Lars’s new home, apparently so they could print the address; fortunately, the police foiled their effort.

Alas, that wasn’t the end of it. On Sunday, Deadline, a program on the state-owned TV channel DR2, aired a half-hour taped interview with Lars by reporter Martin Krasnik. Krasnik’s introduction, tacked onto the beginning of the show later, was not promising. In a manifest attempt to paint Lars as an extremist, Krasnik mentioned Lars’s hosting of Geert Wilders at the Free Press Society and Anders Behring Breivik’s citation of Lars in his “manifesto.”

For grievance-based identity groups on the left, embracing Islamic radicals has often been politically expedient but morally deficient. From women’s organizations who ignore endemic domestic violence in Islamic societies, to black groups who ignore that the Islamic regime in Sudan still enslaves black children, the silence of these purported ‘civil rights’ organizations has been stunningly hypocritical.

Yet all of these groups are expert at mobilizing against what they consider the neo-colonial, racist apartheid regime of Israel. Israel is also, ironically, the only Middle Eastern country that would tolerate them on its soil.

Considering that gays are routinely beaten, murdered by vigilantes, and executed by sovereign governments in the Islamic world, the tendency of left-wing gay organizations to champion Israel’s jihadist enemies is particularly disturbing.

Writing for the Gatestone Institute, Alan Dershowitz identifies a new strain of anti-Israel hysteria in the gay community which characterizes Israel’s tolerant attitude as ‘Pinkwashing’:

This burlesque of an argument first surfaced in a New York Times op-ed that claimed that Israel’s positive approach to gay rights is “a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violation of Palestinians human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.”

The author of the piece, a ‘professor of the humanities,’ apparently lacks the creativity to imagine that Israel might be exhibiting tolerance for gays, not because it hates Arabs, but because it is a Western democracy that believes in the right of the individual to make his or her own choices.